Burke: New criminal justice policies can fix issues

By Terri Burke |
October 19, 2013
| Updated: October 21, 2013 1:09pm

Harris County is considering building a new jail processing center because the population of the county jail, now more than 9,000 inmates, is outstripping the capacity of the current center.

Building a bigger center is penny wise and pound foolish. Crime is on the decline across the country, and Houston is no different. According to an October 2012 Houston Chronicle news story, murders in 2011 were down 22 percent from the year before.

The swelling population of the county jail - already one of the nation's largest - is out of step with the public safety realities in Houston. In fact, the jail is overburdened with people who pose no threat to society. Expanding the processing center is a waste of human capacity and taxpayer dollars. Instead, Harris County should pursue other alternatives to address overcrowding.

First, the bail bond process must be reformed so that people don't end up languishing in jail just because they're poor. A year ago, the Chronicle reported that pretrial detainees comprised 65 percent of the county jail population in 2012. A recent study conducted by Gerald Wheeler, former Harris County Pretrial Department director, and attorney Gerald Fry, with help from a University of Texas-Arlington professor, exposed major inequities in the bail bond process here: People too poor to pay the bail set by a judge, or to pay even a percentage of the bail to a bail bondsman, spend more time in jail than the well off and receive harsher sentences.

Exacerbating the problem, personal recognizance bonds - frequently offered to white collar criminals - are rarely offered for other felony crimes, meaning defendants without cash remain in jail while they await trial. People who are allowed to leave jail on bail are more likely to keep their jobs, continue to see health care professionals, and generally do not become repeat offenders.

Second, the county should ensure that people with mental health issues are diverted entirely out of the criminal justice system. The most direct approach is to provide specific treatment and support plans to prevent them from being picked up by police during a mental health crisis.

Harris County should also take full advantage of a matching-fund mental health diversion program supported last legislative session by Houston-area state legislators Sen. Joan Huffman, a Republican, and Democrats Sen. John Whitmire and Rep. Senfronia Thompson. Roughly one quarter of all Harris County Jail inmates take prescription psychotropic drugs.

Clearly, moving this group of inmates into a more appropriate setting, partially funded by the state, would greatly reduce the burden on the county jail and, ultimately, the processing center.

Low-level drug arrests similarly contribute to overcrowding. Routing drug offenders into appropriate services would reduce the burden on the jail and processing center without sacrificing public safety. Cities like Seattle have seen positive results from programs directing nonviolent drug offenders into rehabilitation and other services rather than into jail.

Seattle's Law Enforcement Assistance Diversion program allows low-level offenders to be taken directly to services by a police officer. Such a program holds the potential to remove a large number of individuals from the line at the processing center.

An ACLU probe this year showed that drug arrests nationwide are not only ramping up jail populations, but are disproportionately affecting communities of color. Texas ranks second in the nation in total arrests for marijuana possession with African-Americans 2.3 times more likely than whites to be arrested.

As with many cities waging the "war on drugs," drug enforcement in Harris County disproportionately targets African-Americans and Latinos, despite years of research that shows similar rates of drug use across races. A Texas Criminal Justice Coalition study noted that the over-enforcement of drug laws in communities of color leads to distrust of law enforcement and undermines the effectiveness of community policing.

Harris County can address the overcrowded processing center in several ways. Building an expanded processing center ignores an opportunity to take more meaningful action to reduce the root causes of over-incarceration that create a bottleneck at booking. Better criminal justice policies can address the center issues and improve the justice system. In turn, the indigent, people with mental health disorders and those struggling with addiction will have better outcomes and be less likely to reoffend.

Burke is executive director of the ACLU of Texas, headquartered in Houston.